Really? This is it? This is the JD Vance dossier that Iran hacked that no one wanted to publish?

One, this is a hideously ordinary oppo file; I'm going to straight-up guess here that there wasn't even any attempt to insert misinfo into this mixture because it's so obvious

1/6 Two, look how Republicans realized that he had painfully stupid positions on childless people and women generally and still picked him

They realized, for instance, surprise surprise, he's against childcare assistance for low income people

Four lessons I've absorbed from involvement in political discourse these past eight years at various levels:

1) I did competitive debate in high school and ran a debate startup as an adult, so I enjoy argument and debate, but I really, really, really rarely ever engage in it. This is as much due to lack of people capable of engaging in dispassionate good-faith debate as it is the inappropriacy of actual point-by-point debate as a tool for most forms of outreach.

People just don't have the note-taking skills capable of tracking an actual debate or attention span for more than 5-7 items in short-term memory - and that is nothing curmudgeonly about, like, how dumb people are these days, hurr durr.

It's more about debate. Like, this way of reading evidence - in order to be able to accommodate more evidence into an argument - is the same way I learned to do it, which is the same way my debate coach learned to do it, and near as I can figure out, it's been that way since somewhere between the 1960s to the 1980s depending on who you ask.

It's more like you have a higher burden not to add to the info-glut that everyone has to cope with.
wsj.com/video/this-deb… 2) most of what people consider "debate" is debate the same way that what people do in nightclubs is "dance"; there's absolutely no question that it's certainly a form of dance, and that it's fine and even really good by itself to do things like dance occasionally with no concern for how it looks.

But if you look at ballet, or the way that dance has evolved in the late 20th century and early 21st, it's recognizably different and in some ways finer than these other acts we group under "dance".

This is also the case with debate; if you want to call online arguments resolved through, essentially popularity and sophistry contests a debate, that's fine, but the way that lawyers, or for that matter high-level NDT, CEDA or high-school policy debaters argue is recognizably different and in many ways, I'd argue, finer.

If you assert that some kind of psy-op or staged assassination event is going on with the would-be Trump assassin (the second one, not the first) you have a pretty tall hill to climb on that, and it quite easily falls apart when facts like this emerge.

I believe this may be a very, very special level of stupid right here.

Let me walk you through what you're seeing: that is basically an AKM receiver in a sporter stock and it appears to have a scope that is attached with either rubber bands or electrical tape. For some reason, I'm guessing as a kind of rudimentary sun shade, there is a paper tube on Routh's scope which would crumple up against his eye if he actually fired it.

It takes you a second to grasp the full, almost monstrous stupidity of what you're seeing - at the front of the rifle, Routh appears to have built up a 'hump' of electrical tape on which the objective end of the scope rests. I'm honestly surprised he could even sight that in, because if you shoot it like that, I'm fairly confident the scope will fall off within a few shots, I can't imagine it would hold zero.

As suspected, this is a 7.62 x 39mm weapon which makes a shot at 400-500 yards unlikely bordering on implausible, especially with that scope setup. He would probably have been better off with iron sights quite frankly.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. This is why you wait for facts.

I'd hesitate to say "every time", but it seems like 99% of it, rushing to a conclusion that sounds cool for temporary clout is going to result in being wrong, publicly, and that is happening, right now, with all the conspiracy theorists who were breathlessly foaming at the mouth speculating a mere week ago.

Believe it or not, sometimes, random bad things just happen more intensely during a certain period of time, as an intended or, frequently, unintended consequence of people trying engineer some political effect by strategically riling people up. This is the nature of "stochastic" violence.

Jump to conclusions for clout and you end up looking like a charlatan and fool real easy, like a lot of people out there are right now - if they even understand, I suspect the liberal conspiracy theory crowd isn't exactly good at understanding firearms design, deployment scenarios & TTPs.

Yeah no that's the weapon your boy was gonna do a 500m sniper shot with lol

Right through the Secret Service bubble

Very plausible, what a great theory It's a common mistake in people who have never tried to understand guns; nobody ever realizes what a big deal scopes and scope mounts are

An easy rule of thumb in precision rifle shooting is, you spend as much as, if not more, on your scope than you do your rifle

And scope mounts are a huge deal. These are scope mounts from Spuhr, Larue and Nightforce, this would be what a knowledgeable private citizen shooter would use; I'm pretty sure the cheapest one is $250

Image 4 is a rail that goes on the top of the SKS and attaches to the front sight base, which is anchored to the front trunion, I believe, which makes it at least somewhat capable of holding zero

Any of these would at least be a plausible setup

What you're seeing from Routh is a jackass with a stunning level of ignorance of riflery

NAFO addresses a fundamental gap in information war defense strategy.

We know - as in, the newsreading public knows - that that Russian intelligence agencies are running influence ops that target American civilians. but there's no civilian response strategy.

1/6

---

Sources:

Collier, Kevin, "Russian propagandists are still targeting Americans in influence operations, Meta says", NBC News, Aug 18 2024

Kelley, Michael J., "Understanding Russian Disinformation and How the Joint Force Can Address It", May 29 2024

Myers, Steven Lee & Barnes, Julian E., "U.S. Investigating Americans Who Worked With Russian State Television", Aug 21 2024 nbcnews.com/tech/security/…
publications.armywarcollege.edu/News/Display/A…
archive.is/https://www.ny… Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and this is one such claim.

To be clear, I am asserting that:

1) America is in a social-media information war with Russia,

2) we are losing, insofar as that war has compromised at least one major political party in America to the point that one of its elected members has stated so publicly on live national TV (the House Intelligence Committee chair, actually) and

3) we need civilian digital movements (similar to NAFO, if not NAFO itself) as defensive countermeasures in order to not lose that information war

Such evidence is, luckily, not lacking with regard to Russian cyberwar & influence efforts targeting Americans, nor for NAFO efficacy at this point in 2024.

---

Sources:

Anonymous FBI Special Agent, "Affidavit in support of seizure warrant", United States of America v. Certain Domains, 2024,

Lotz, Avery, "House Intelligence Committee chair says Russian propaganda has spread through parts of GOP", CNN, Apr 7 2024


NAFO efficacy
1. Braun, Stuart, "Ukraine's info warriors battling Russian trolls", DW, Sep 17 2022,

2. McInnis, et al., "#NAFO and Winning the Information War: Lessons Learned from Ukraine", Center for Strategic & International Studies, Oct 5 2022,

3. Giles, Keir, "Humour in online information warfare: Case study on Russia’s war on Ukraine", NATO Hybrid Center of Excellence Working Paper No. 26, Nov 2023, p. 28, justice.gov/opa/media/1366…
cnn.com/2024/04/07/pol…
dw.com/en/nafo-ukrain…

hybridcoe.fi/wp-content/upl…

See, it's actually interesting that this guy wasn't in NAFO.

A lot of the people I follow and who follow me are NAFO fellas, so as a result, I have social graph connections to most people involved in Ukraine war activism.

But my only three mutuals with that guy were three journalists who followed him after he attempted to assassinate Trump.

Remember, we have open membership, all you need to do is donate to Ukraine. I've been cautioning people for a minute about this, just assume that NAFO is already infiltrated; it won't do them much good the way it's structured anyway.

This guy even replied to Karen Dotcom and Black in the Empire, like a lot of NAFO fellas did. Yet no social graph connections.

I chalk up the oddness of it all to, Routh simply sucked at social media - I mean, did you see his tweets - but it's interesting that he sucked so bad, spammed so much, and never seems to have come across NAFO
Here he is talking back to Karen Dotcom and Russian in the Black Empire or whatever

And still, no mutuals with that guy

We don't have enough data to construct an account of the Trump assassination attempt.

But, I think we have enough to shoot some of the wilder, stupider theories.

What I have is:

- social media profiles (before they were deleted, I have video recordings I'm using for screenshots)

- interview in New York Times in '23 ()

- thread talking about him as a frankly grifty, unstable-sounding "recruiter" with a cockamamie plan to get Afghan troops into Ukraine (, also get a lawyer, please)

- a fairly good picture of his gear including a medium/high confidence assessment of weapon platform ()

From this let's test out a few of the theories:nytimes.com/2023/03/25/wor…

https://x.com/v8mile/status/1804097069876916506

https://x.com/FluteMagician/status/1835448309105746117

It's almost trivially easy to rebut some of the conspiracy theories, actually, even at our current imperfect state of knowledge mere hours out- remember, we haven't heard from the guy yet, and he was taken into custody alive. But some of the facts, as currently known, give the lie to such theories.

Conspiracy theory 1: Professional sniper
Almost totally disproven by choice of weapon platform. Assume a 9-inch vital zone (head, or solar plexus/midsection). With a (generously) 2.5 MOA AK-platform Saiga or SKS with a "sporterized" stock chambered in 7.62, you're looking at 10 inch CEP at 400 yards and nearly 50 MOA of drop.

The inaccuracy is bad enough: you could be aimed dead center at the vital zone, mathematically perfectly, and the sheer inaccuracy of the rifle would make you miss.

The equipment makes it more implausible. Assuming he's using, say, a 3-9x scope (say, a Leupold VX-6 popular with the low-budget crowd). That scope has only 60 MOA of adjustment (30 up, 30 down). Really nice scopes have 50 MOA up, 50 MOA down or so, I doubt he has one of those.

So, unless he has a 30 MOA canted scope mount, he wouldn't even be able to dial in his elevation because, realistically, people aren't shooting 7.62 x 39 out to 400 yards, they use 7.62 x 54R rifles (e.g., SVD Dragunov.

You hit a 9-inch plate at 400m with an AK-platform weapon in 7.62 x 39 at the range, people will probably buy you a beer. It's not easy.

MAGAs hate 'Murder in Mississippi' (1965) by Norman Rockwell because they want to believe the lie in everything that Rockwell painted before.

It is difficult to see the beauty in it, as with all of Rockwell's post-propaganda period. It's easier to believe in the America of Rockwell's 1950s work, an America with clean people living lives of plenty, a kind of aesthetic cowardice that manifests in revisionist history for MAGA trash aesthetics ("trashthetics" if you prefer, which I don't).

The ugly truth behind the comforting pictures of white people who look like you is the same thing erased by the "Great Again" in MAGA, the same as it was during Lindbergh's racist "America First" campaign. It's based on systematic erasure of anything that interferes with a conveniently white, great American past.

The ugly truth is this, one of Rockwell's starkest images, painted in the period emerging after his awakening during the Civil Rights struggle.

Dennis Rafferty at describes the context as follows:

"The victims had been college students volunteering during a summer campaign in Mississippi to encourage black residents to register to vote. At that time, less than 10 percent of eligible blacks in Mississippi were registered, and now with the signing into law of the Civil Rights Act, striking down long-standing state “Jim Crow” laws prohibiting African Americans from voting, black voters for the first time had federal laws protecting these rights, which superseded and nullified previous state voting laws.

No longer having any legal means to prevent blacks from voting, local white racists now turned to an organized program of terror and intimidation to discourage African Americans exercising their new voting rights. To achieve these ends, the local sheriff’s office was clandestinely working closely with the Ku Klux Klan, who burnt the church hosting the summer voting rights campaign to the ground, an act intended to terrorize the liberal student activists that had descended on the town (a local newspaper described it as an “invasion” of unwelcome outsiders)."

Rockwell is in full mastery of his painterly powers, sharpened by advertising technique as well as a dialogue with a past unvarnished by masturbatory white supremacist myths. This is clearest in his similarities to Francisco Goya y Lucientes.

1/4livingchurch.org In The Third of May 1808, Goya solves similar problems to Rockwell's pencil sketches towards the full-sized version of this image.

The political similarities are fascinating; in Goya's case, his painting illustrates Spanish resistance to Napoleonic invasion.

Rather than making something intricate and detailed for a private patron, Goya makes something impactful, stark, even drastically simplified. The moment of the men in a Spanish village being collectively punished by the French for the actions of a sniper is reduced to a single flash, even a single color.

As with readings of Rockwell's Civil Rights work, it's easy for your average trashy fascist to dismiss it as victim-celebration, even celebrate the horrors it shows as if to intimidate the broader public in a show of collective sadism; and the answers are to that, I submit, are the same for us today as they were for mid-20th-century antifascist artists and theorists.

Search 'Norman Rockwell' today, you get mostly picturesque, clean, agreeable white Americans living clean, agreeable lives, 2.5 kids and a house with a white picket fence.

And then this: 'The Problem We All Live With', from 1964.

At first you don't see the beauty.
(🧵) Most of Rockwell's work is almost if not outright propagandistic.

I'd argue there's actually elements of fascism in there, like references to an always-receding glorious past and racial monotony so severe it looks like a satire today.

That changes in the early '60s.

Thread of actual quotes about Trump:

"Trump is a fucking moron." - Rex Tillerson, Trump's first Secretary of State

1/6 "Trump is an idiot, unhinged."

John F. Kelly, Trump's second White House chief of staff

2/6

I realized, Elon not only fired the compliance people at Twitter who dealt with the sanctions violations I found in '22, he doesn't even know how sanctions work himself and built a system that signs contracts with SDNs for blue-checks

So X is a massive sanctions violator SDN designations are they are used today are broadly speaking derived from the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA

So, the IEEPA contains a specific exemption for cases like "what if Twitter gives Khameini an account"

This worked in '22

https://x.com/JoohnChoe/status/1745303290483798300

probably worth unpacking:

in '70 Mary Ainsworth at Johns Hopkins demonstrated four patterns of mother-child attachment when tested in the "strange situation" experiment where an infant is temporarily left alone with strangers

This is relevant to political behavior
1/10

https://twitter.com/AshaRangappa_/status/1829864971913871552

Attachment theory is useful both in decoding politicians and understanding voters because it

1) typifies people's reactions to their parents, which also shapes how they think about their romantic partners and their societies to an extent

2) it is unusually well-tested and valid

Let's try something different. There's 71 days until Nov 5.

I'm going to show you 71 beautiful things.

This is Delacroix "Liberty Leading the People", 1830.

Let me explain a couple things about why this painting is revolutionary.

1/ Today I showed close to a million people one of the ugliest paintings I've ever seen in my life, so this is probably a worthwhile exercise.

You might think because of Lena Rusleva that all Western political art is bad or propagandistic.

This is not true.

https://x.com/JoohnChoe/status/1827935431822114853

whenever someone says 'left can't meme' or 'MAGAs aren't weird', I think about this painting that a Trump supporter made and it's not, like, a @GaryPetersonUSA parody

That is a painting a MAGA made that they are proud of

want me to explain why this is bad?

let me explain:
(🧵) Here's Rogier van der Weyden at the tail end of the Northern Renaissance, this is 'Annunciation Triptych' ca 1434

It's showing the moment when an angel tells the Virgin Mary she's going to give birth to Jesus

We have an actual budget for @ResponsibleFP to run ads, now that we have t-shirt money coming in, so it's worth looking at @SenatorTester and Montana again. For transparency's sake let's do this publicly.

Buckle up, this gets into the weeds fast.

1/13 At a superficial level population density maps suggest six major population centers in Montana with a historical divide between eastern & western Montana.

I find Omaha, Nebraska fascinating lately.

Omaha has, effectively, one electoral college vote, because of the way that Nebraska apportions its electoral college votes; it's proportional, not all-or-nothing.

1/11



In April of this year, it looks like the Trump campaign tried, unsuccessfully, to change the way that Omaha allocates its EC delegates; their challenge failed, so Nebraska is doing what it always does, and Omaha ends up key again.

There are three parts of an argumentative act in Platonic theory:

- logos, its logical grist
- ethos, the manner in which it's delivered
- pathos, its emotional appeal component

Harris' primary task in her DNC speech was ethos: she had to show she can be Presidential.
(🧵) So the really interesting thing that's happening here is the "solution" that Harris finds to a frankly ferociously unenviable problem to me, portraying a 'plausible', believable President that you could vote for, while avoiding two very common tropes applied to female speakers.

Used to run a debate startup before I did this political thing for money. The reason why I switched was this advice I got that I'll share with you:

It's all about the community

This is sort of opaque without context so let me provide that -

(🧵) Back in December of '17 I knew a couple of things the rest of the world didn't know about the special election in Alabama for a U.S. Senate seat that had just happened.

In March of '18 the rest of the world found out one of them.
archive.is/SXaBD

The question is, where do we run @ResponsibleFP advertisements using the Make America Joyful Again cat (or just "joy cat") if we're looking to maximize our impact?

Start from paths to victory; there are three paths to victory to look at, two for Harris and one for Trump.

1/5 Path 1 is "blue wall states" plus one part of Nebraska.

Path 2 is, flip a Sun Belt state. If Harris loses one or even multiple Blue Wall states but carries a state like AZ, NC or Nevada (where Sen. Rosen (D, NV) is up by two-digit numbers in polls), she can win.

2/

It's interesting maybe even useful to go into why MAGAs are so obsessed with that one photo of a crowd in Michigan that they think is photoshopped or AI-generated.

In summary, it's because of the fundamental lie of MAGA's popularity that they have to keep up.

1/4 There are recurrent lies that entities like MAGA, Russia, or Boeing have to keep up - indeed, telling these lies is how they sustain themselves and survive, it's how they exploit the audiences they lie to.

These lies are repeated, basic violations of 'felicity conditions'

2/4

So on Twitter at least most of you probably know me from NAFO or the resistance, to a lesser extent, my research being in the Times or the Post.

One thing I also do is make memes; some you've probably seen, others not.

I track them too.

1/12





I made this.

This is the first post of this image on Facebook (and also proof that I created it):


and on Twitter

To borrow a meme phrase itself, what you're seeing right here is meme warfare.facebook.com/choejoohn/post…

https://x.com/JoohnChoe/status/1821743535952900313

A lot of people think this one by @helenstickler is AI-generated. It's not.

This is *ordinary* for the Harris campaign.

Something is happening, and whatever dumb new attack Trump & Vance come up with, history will remember this time as about her, not them. (1/2)

https://twitter.com/FeistyLibLady/status/1821253550686540287

That's not fake; the signs are two-sided, that's why they look like they face backwards. That's not AI

That's 15K people in Michigan.

Trump, by comparison, couldn't even fill a 10k person auditorium where Harris had people standing in the parking lot just to be a part of things